The spaces and places of Chicago, as we descended on Monday night.
I have just returned from the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Chicago. I’m obviously not a geographer, but I got an opportunity to talk about my work on the print culture of geographical knowledge in the nineteenth century at the conference, and I got excited about the possibility of talking about that work to a group of non-historians who would nevertheless be interested in it. It ended up being a great experience, but also a really odd one, because attending the main annual conference of a discipline that is not your own is an odd kind of outsiderism.
I did not feel particularly out of place intellectually. I know something about the scholarly practice of geography; I know something about how the discipline developed in the nineteenth century, and I know something of its parameters from interacting socially and professionally with practicing geographers. Also, geography really sprawls as a discipline, and seems to find a place for pretty much any topic or any methodology. The sense of outsiderism was social, not in the sense that people were rude or unfriendly, but in the sense that I was walking into an ongoing conversation in the middle and had to struggle to figure out what people were talking about and why they cared.
